http://www.hollandonrails.nl/articles/482-Webservices-in-RubyOnRails Since the "launch of rails 2.0":http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done, the standard support for generating soap services with rails was removed. SOAP was replaced for standard REST support. This was done because Rails became entirely resource driven and uses REST as the architecture to accomplish that. "SOAP on the other hand":http://www.developerfusion.com/article/7991/rest-and-net-35-part-1-why-rest-based-services/ implements specific method names and sends all calls all these methods using a POST request. So what if your client application requires a soap service and you therefore have the need to develop a soap service in your rails application? You will need actionwebservice for that. Luckily actionwebservice was not lost entirely when rails dropped support for SOAP. Simply install the "pantzel-actionwebservice":http://github.com/panztel/actionwebservice gem and you are ready to generate a basic SOAP service. The good thing of actionwebservice is that you don't have to worry about creating a WSDL. Simply define the structure of your webservice, start the application and go to http://localhost:3000/webservicename/wsdl and the wsdl is presented to you generated from the webservice api definition! For examples of how to use the actionwebservice gem, there are some good examples in the example directory of the gem itself.